That's How the Light Gets In

These are travel notes of a seeker after meaning, and it is the good fortune of Dr. Rako's readers that having found and lived through many answers she is, in the end, unwilling to regard any of them as final enough to end her search. This remarkably candid memoir is like a dance in which components of the author s self child, parent, lover, learner, teacher, therapist move in relation to one another. The reader experiences fragmentation and integration, distress and delight. This is life as lived thoughtfully, deeply, and honestly.

Rako (The Hormone of Desire.) trains her professional lens inward in her first memoir. Reflecting on her life and the appeal of psychiatry as both career and calmative yields a rich loam of memory and motivation, which are often inextricable from a therapeutic standpoint. In seeking the roots of her fears and desires, Rako sweeps her history's crowded terrain, her mind a searchlight picking up telling detail. She discerns profound significance in a torrent of events in her formative years, an assertion made plausible by the frenzied, meddling Jewish household of her Worcester, Mass., 1950s childhood. From childhood, Rako aimed to please her mother through piano playing, then by attending medical school and jumping into an early marriage; though her mother was a remote, detached figure, Rako still struggled to break away from her. She considers the fraught yet taut bonds between the women in her family five generations trying to reconcile legacy with individuality. After the wrenching process of enlightenment, it appears Rako has achieved a calm, even amused resignation that glows with lucidity. Her memories and epiphanies make agreeable and often stirringly inspirational company.

SUSAN RAKO, M.D., is a highly respected expert in the field of women's health and the author of two previous books, THE HORMONE OF DESIRE and NO MORE PERIODS?. Following medical education at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and specialty training in psychiatry at Harvard’s Massachusetts Mental Health Center, Dr. Rako has been a psychiatrist in private practice in the Boston area for more than thirty years. In 2003 she founded the educational nonprofit, Women’s Health On Alert, Inc. (WHOA). On a parallel track with her medical work, in 1988 Dr. Rako earned an M.S. in Film Production from Boston University College of Communication. In May 2005, as Executive Producer, she brought the Boston premier of the play Hysterics to the Lyric Stage. Dr. Rako's work has been featured in countless publications, including The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune, Newsday, and USA Today, and on The Today Show, BBC World Today, and Dateline NBC. She can be reached via her website.